Despite the seemingly infinite uses of technology, there are times when, at least for me, the benefits of using technology are outweighed by the hassle of doing so. Throughout my time in AP English last year, I was the only student who preferred to handwrite my notes for every novel as opposed to typing them like the rest of the class. Despite my having the single most ungodly handwriting that I have ever seen, my teacher let me handwrite the notes after I explained to him that I had more difficulty in typing out my thoughts rather than just scrawling my thoughts while I read(it helped that he also had somewhat illegible handwriting). As a result, in my most difficult class of the semester, Chinese 101, I chose to stick to practicing using a pen and paper and my textbook rather than using EverNote or any such apparatus. The reason that I found Chinese to be so difficult, despite the fact that consistently scored A’s on the class’s assignments was because the very nature of learning a new language required an inordinate amount of my time and was, at times, extremely frustrating. Although I didn’t always use Evernote, when I did, I found that one of the best parts of using the software was the ease with which I could keep my work organized. I used Evernote’s WebClipper during the Community description portion of the School Investigations to keep a readily accessible portion of my research in a sport where I wouldn’t lose the articles to an unending number of open tabs in Chrome. I also used EverNote as a place to keep a strict log of my thoughts on A Hope in the Unseen, and a less structured set of notes for the other assignments within the class. By the end of the semester, I ended up, including the shared notebook, having five different notebooks. I separated each class into different notebooks, and then organized the different notebooks using tags based off of the core idea of the notes I used. As I became increasingly more comfortable and familiar with the layout of EverNote, I would often use the WebClipper EverNote extension either when I was specifically doing research for a project within school, or when I was simply watching videos or reading articles on my own time and found something that I thought was pertinent to one of my classes. I often didn’t find it necessary to use EverNote or Zotero to keep myself organized. Despite that, the ability to be able to cite a website with one touch, or to be able to neatly shuffle away my notes for a class and classify them by topic will remain a useful set of tools that I can use throughout the rest of my education. My ability to easily create citations will undoubtedly ease the hassle of researching for projects in future courses, Additionally, being able to keep a set of readily accessible notes will, in all likelihood, help me to maintain a higher level of organization beyond just what I could manage using my own personal writing and a notebook.
As a result, in my most difficult class of the semester, Chinese 101, I chose to stick to practicing using a pen and paper and my textbook rather than using EverNote or any such apparatus. The reason that I found Chinese to be so difficult, despite the fact that consistently scored A’s on the class’s assignments was because the very nature of learning a new language required an inordinate amount of my time and was, at times, extremely frustrating.
Although I didn’t always use Evernote, when I did, I found that one of the best parts of using the software was the ease with which I could keep my work organized. I used Evernote’s WebClipper during the Community description portion of the School Investigations to keep a readily accessible portion of my research in a sport where I wouldn’t lose the articles to an unending number of open tabs in Chrome. I also used EverNote as a place to keep a strict log of my thoughts on A Hope in the Unseen, and a less structured set of notes for the other assignments within the class. By the end of the semester, I ended up, including the shared notebook, having five different notebooks. I separated each class into different notebooks, and then organized the different notebooks using tags based off of the core idea of the notes I used. As I became increasingly more comfortable and familiar with the layout of EverNote, I would often use the WebClipper EverNote extension either when I was specifically doing research for a project within school, or when I was simply watching videos or reading articles on my own time and found something that I thought was pertinent to one of my classes.
I often didn’t find it necessary to use EverNote or Zotero to keep myself organized. Despite that, the ability to be able to cite a website with one touch, or to be able to neatly shuffle away my notes for a class and classify them by topic will remain a useful set of tools that I can use throughout the rest of my education. My ability to easily create citations will undoubtedly ease the hassle of researching for projects in future courses, Additionally, being able to keep a set of readily accessible notes will, in all likelihood, help me to maintain a higher level of organization beyond just what I could manage using my own personal writing and a notebook.